


there are mornings

by kittu9



Category: Rurouni Kenshin
Genre: Angst, F/M, Marriage, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-15
Updated: 2011-06-15
Packaged: 2017-10-20 11:12:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 284
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/212161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittu9/pseuds/kittu9
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If love is the answer, why does it raise so many questions? Kaoru knows that Tomoe is dead, and that loving Kenshin isn’t a competition. But that doesn’t make her feel any better.</p>
            </blockquote>





	there are mornings

**Author's Note:**

> Written in Fall 2006. Set post-series.

_If love is the answer (_ she ponders _) why does it raise so many questions?_

 

 

It wasn't so much the fact that she _minded_ Tomoe's lingering presence—but Kaoru always felt the other woman's ghost shamefully. After all, Tomoe had been perfect in life, an absurd and porcelain goddess, and had died before she could become otherwise in her husband's eyes. She could not disappoint.

( _You goose_ , a voice in Kaoru's head warned her, firmly. _As much as she loved him in the end, she nearly killed him twice. First with her betrayal and again when she died, he was utterly bereft—and remember that he loves you, with all your tanuki-idiocy and you are alive._ )

It was hardest, Kaoru thought, because Kenshin left one very much star-struck, as if he were not quite human. Never mind that it was for her coarseness and ridiculous fallibilities that he loved her, terrible and precious things in their own right. Kaoru felt like she lived half of her waking life as a feral beast, hot-blooded and fearsomely afraid of death, that terrible and muted sort of loneliness.

This was their common bond; still, she sometimes felt unnecessarily hurt by the far-off look in her husband's eyes, the parts of him she could not know, the awareness that he knew everything about her. Tomoe had caught hold of that, the hidden and deeply vulnerable youth that had sustained him. Now, carrying Kenshin's child, Kaoru almost felt as if she was doomed to be forever separate from her husband and the ghost of his first wife. She was forever grasping in the dark for answers that did not apply to the questions that her life now set before her.


End file.
